Elemental Music and acclaimed archival producer Zev Feldman will release four stunning, never-before-released albums on vinyl on April 18, 2026, for Record Store Day.
Michel Petrucciani – Kuumbwa
Bill Evans at the BBC
Cecil Taylor Unit – Fragments, The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts
Freddie King – Feeling Alright: The Complete 1975 Nancy Jazz Pulsation Concerts
ELEMENTAL MUSIC UNVEILS KUUMBWA, ARCHIVAL CONCERT RECORDING BY MICHEL PETRUCCIANI, AS EXCLUSIVE TWO-LP RELEASE ON APRIL 18, 2026
Legendary Pianist Captured in a Fiery 1987 Performance at Titular Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, California
Thoughtfully Annotated Set Includes Reflections by Pianist’s Son Alexandre Petrucciani, Drummer Eliot Zigmund, Italian Pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, Journalist Thierry Pérémarti, Kuumbwa Co-Founder Tim Jackson
Elemental Music will release Kuumbwa, a superlative 1987 trio concert recorded at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, California as an exclusive two-LP set to be released on April 18, 2026 with CD and digital versions available on April 24, 2026. The album is part of Record Store Day in the EU.
This first Petrucciani artifact among the label’s many jazz treasures—produced for release by the acclaimed “Jazz Detective” Zev Feldman and available on 180-gram vinyl with mixing and sound restoration by Marc Doutrepont (EQuuS) and LP mastering by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab—was a discovery from within the archives of Kuumbwa Jazz co-founder Tim Jackson. The package includes a reflection from Jackson on both Kuumbwa (a pioneer of nonprofit jazz presentation) and Petrucciani himself, along with insights on the brilliant French pianist from his son, Alexandre; his longtime drummer Eliot Zigmund, who accompanied Petrucciani at Kuumbwa; French jazz journalist Thierry Pérémarti; and Italian fellow pianist Enrico Pieranunzi.
“I’ve been friendly with Tim since 2006, when I was working at Concord and we released the Monterey Jazz Highlights while he was Artistic Director of the festival,” producer Feldman recalls. “We’ve stayed in touch. He shared the Kuumbwa archives with me, and I was blown away with this recording.”
The trio performance from May 11, 1987, contains much to blow listeners away. Along with Petrucciani and Zigmund, the lineup includes English bass wizard Dave Holland, all of them at the top of their respective and collective games. The 24-year-old pianist and French émigré, who had relocated to New York in 1984, had only just become familiar to wider American jazz fans with his signing to Blue Note Records in 1986. He lost no time in showing that new audience what he could do.
Despite his osteogenesis imperfecta, the genetic bone disorder that stunted his growth and left him in nearly constant pain, Petrucciani’s imagination and zeal for the music are as flamboyantly on display as is his talent on the Kuumbwa recordings. They paint a portrait of the pianist “Exactly as he was in life,” notes Pérémarti. “Extravagant; romantic; facetious; turbulent; sweet and gentle; impatient; funny and full of life. His music never lied; it is the exact mirror of his character. He plays in this recording with such vigor, such ardor and energy, and at the same time like a child rapt in wonder.”
“My father was a force of nature,” remarks Alexandre Petrucciani. “I hope this new release conveys not only his love of jazz but also the love he gave to the world—because he was bigger than music.”
His enthusiasm was clearly infectious: Both Holland and Zigmund are audibly inspired to play with uncanny levels of electricity alongside Petrucciani. “Playing with Michel was probably one of the most exciting periods of my life,” says Zigmund, whose resume also boasts work with Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi and Lee Konitz. “When I go back and listen to recordings from those times, the energy, the freshness, the desire to play are apparent.…With Michel you never knew what was happening when he got on stage, where he would go, where he would take a tune, which tune he might choose just out of the blue.”
“Of course, it was striking to watch Michel play because of his physical challenges. There was always this sense of wonder to his performances,” Jackson adds. “He sounded different than a lot of European pianists as he had that funky touch, yet he still had that beautiful impressionistic sound that I love so much. Michel was the same way as a person. He was a real down-home guy, and fun to hang with. His music was a beautiful mixture of cultures, melded into an intricate tapestry that speaks to people in a deep way.”
Kuumbwa offers a fresh new lens onto that tapestry, at the height of Petrucciani’s fame. “The performance is smoking and there’s heavy enthusiasm from the audience,” says Feldman. “This one is a very special release.”
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BILL EVANS AT THE BBC BRINGS TOGETHER TWO 1965 BRITISH TV BROADCASTS BY THE LEGENDARY PIANIST FOR THE FIRST TIME ON LP FOR RECORD STORE DAY
The Legendary Pianist’s Trio With Bassist Chuck Israels and Drummer Larry Bunker is Captured in a Spellbinding, Intimate Performance, Out April 18, 2026
Expansive Package Includes an Interview with Chuck Israels, Appreciations by Jamie Cullum and James Pearson, and Notes by Evans Scholar Marc Myers
Elemental Music will release Bill Evans at the BBC, presenting a 1965 British television performance for the first time on vinyl, as a deluxe 180-gram 2-LP Record Store Day exclusive on April 18, 2026. The album will also be available on CD and digital download on April 24.
The album combines two episodes of a program entitled Jazz 625, hosted by English trumpet player Humphrey Lyttelton, and features Evans’ remarkable second working trio with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker.
Bill Evans at the BBC was produced for release by award-winning producer and “Jazz Detective” Zev Feldman in cooperation with the Bill Evans Estate. Audio was transferred from the original tapes at the BBC with mixing and sound restoration by Marc Doutrepont (EQuuS) and LP mastering by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab.
The album marks Feldman’s 15th production with the Evans Estate, a stellar body of work that has contributed much to the legacy of the legendary pianist. The deluxe package includes an interview with Chuck Israels about his memories of Evans and of the broadcast; reflections on Evans’ influence by singer/pianist Jamie Cullum and by pianist James Pearson, artistic director of the famed London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s; and notes by Evans scholar Marc Myers.
“Working with the Evans family and curating these albums is an enormous highlight of my career,” Feldman says. “I first became aware of these recordings of Evans in the 1990s when I worked in New York City. I purchased it on laserdisc originally and have been familiar with this material for quite some time. It’s a wonderful chapter in Evans’s recorded legacy, and these recordings are deserving of an official CD and LP release.”
The broadcasts that make up Bill Evans at the BBC – originally aired on May 12 and December 29, 1965 – represent the pianist’s sole performance at the BBC TV studios. The two half-hour sets were filmed back to back on March 19 of that year, midway through the trio’s four-week stint at Ronnie Scott’s. The group with Israels and Bunker had been together for two years at that point, after Evans’ first trio had dissolved in the wake of Scott LaFaro’s tragic death in 1961 and Paul Motian’s 1963 exit to join pianist Paul Bley.
“By 1965, when the Jazz 625 shows were taped, the trio was a well-oiled machine,” recalls Israels in his interview with Feldman. “We were very free in our interpretations of things because we were comfortable with the material and with each other.”
That comfort level is brilliantly evidenced throughout Bill Evans at the BBC, which finds the trio exploring its repertoire with an unhurried, luxuriant, profoundly focused rapport. The repertoire will be familiar to even the most casual of Evans fans – five of the pieces are culled from Trio ’65, the album that the band had recorded in February but was not yet released at the time of these tapings. They include John Carisi’s “Israel” and Earl Zindars’ “Elsa” and “How My Heart Sings,” along with the standards “Who Can I Turn To?” and “Come Rain or Come Shine.” The setlists are filled out with Evans favorites like “Waltz for Debby” and “Re: Person I Knew,” and selections that he returned to often: “Summertime,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and Miles Davis’ “Nardis.”
Jazz 625 aired for two years, from April 1964 to August 1966, on BBC Two. The show’s title is a reference to the 625-lines UHF utilized by the channel, as opposed to the more common 405-lines VHF system. The series was launched after the resolution of a years-long dispute between the UK Musicians Union and the American Federation of Musicians that allowed musicians from the U.S. to perform in Britain for the first time since the 1930s. Over the course of its run, the show aired appearances by such greats as Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
Evans devotees may have seen these episodes in various forms in the intervening years – longtime aficionados like Feldman, they may have caught them on laserdisc in the 1990s, while others may have seen them on DVD in the early 2000s or in clips on YouTube. This release, however, isolates the music from its accompanying visuals for the first time in an official release and remastered to maximize its audio quality.
The result, Myers writes in his liner notes, “is a fascinating listen. Without the visual, you are forced to listen in a more attentive and granular way. Rather than hear the music as background to what you are seeing, you feel it and the trio’s excellence more deeply. Upon listening to the music on this album, I gasped. The trio here is at its peak, playing music that is un-rushed, caressing and gorgeous.”
Cullum praises the achievements of this stellar group in his conversation with Feldman, saying, “the trio with Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker really swung. I love Bunker’s playing, the sound of his brushes, the feeling of swing, so propulsive. Also, Bill was swinging really hard at that time. Watching the tapes, I just couldn’t believe the economy of it all, both the music and his movements at the piano. That trio was fantastic, and shouldn’t be judged in the shadow of the one with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. It got to swing hard despite the sheer quietness you see onstage. It has a fire of its own.”
Six decades after the trio converged before a reserved but appreciative audience in a British television studio, that fire continues to burn brightly via these captivating recordings. As Israels himself recognized in an interview with Marc Myers, “Yes, we were damn near perfect at the BBC.”
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FRAGMENTS: THE COMPLETE 1969 SALLE PLEYEL CONCERTS, FEATURING TWO EXPLOSIVE UNRELEASED CECIL TAYLOR PERFORMANCES, ARRIVES FROM ELEMENTAL MUSIC ON RECORD STORE DAY
The Legendary Avant-Jazz Pianist’s 1969 Unit with Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers and Andrew Cyrille is Captured at Their Creative Peak on Three-LP Set Out April 18, 2026
Expansive Package, Also Available on CD April 24, Includes Notes by Biographer Philip Freeman, Memories from Drummer Andrew Cyrille, and Appreciations from Karen Borca, Matthew Shipp, Jack DeJohnette and More
One of avant-garde jazz titan Cecil Taylor’s most powerful, but under-documented bands will receive its due and more on Elemental Music’s April 18 release of Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts, a three-LP set of previously unreleased 1969 performances by the legendary pianist and his Unit.
The Taylor package, an exclusive Record Store Day release, was produced as part of a continuing partnership between INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), the official French radio and television audiovisual archive, and album producer Zev Feldman, who has worked with INA in the past to release performances by Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Cannonball Adderley, Larry Young, Yusef Lateef, and many others.
Sonically restored and mixed by Marc Doutrepont at EQuuS, Fragments has been mastered for LP by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab. The album will also be released on CD on April 24.
The incarnation of the Cecil Taylor Unit heard on Fragments existed for only a year. In January 1969, tenor saxophonist and flutist Sam Rivers was invited to join the existing trio of Taylor, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille. In June, they flew to France, where they were in residence at the Fondation Maeght, a private art institution on the French Riviera, for nearly two months. They mingled with painters, sculptors, dancers and composers, and rehearsed daily, performing two marathon concerts at the end of July. One of these was recorded and released as a triple LP, Nuits De La Fondation Maeght (US title: The Great Concert Of Cecil Taylor), but this set has never been reissued on CD.
Taylor and company were then invited by legendary promoter George Wein to support the Duke Ellington Orchestra, along with Miles Davis’s current band, on a 15-date tour in October and November 1969, billed as the Newport Jazz Festival In Europe. The itinerary included shows in Milan, Rome, Vienna, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, Rotterdam, and two performances — an afternoon and an evening show — at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Those two shows are presented in full for the first time ever on Fragments.
The quartet’s concerts consisted of a single marathon piece, created anew each time they took the stage but rooted in composition (both Rivers and Lyons worked from sheet music), dubbed “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington.” The afternoon performance, heard on the second and third LPs of the set, lasted more than 90 minutes; the evening show was a relatively concise 50 minutes. Both sets were also filmed for broadcast by ORTF (the French national TV and radio network), but have never been released officially in any form.
Fragments includes an essay on the intertwining musical and personal relationships between Taylor, Ellington and Davis by Philip Freeman, author of In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor. It also includes reflections from Andrew Cyrille (the last surviving member of the 1969 Unit), Jimmy Lyons’ widow Karen Borca, Sam Rivers’ daughter Monique, drummer Jack DeJohnette (a member of the Davis band in 1969), and pianist Matthew Shipp.
“This music is of biblical importance in many ways for fans of Cecil Taylor and the avant garde movement,” says Feldman. “It was captured at an exciting time in his career, joined by a group of absolute titans in this music.”Says Freeman, who co-produced the album with Feldman, “This was an amazing group that was able to bring Taylor’s music to life in unprecedented ways; the contrast between Rivers and Lyons is extraordinarily vivid, and the interplay between Taylor and Cyrille is amazing. The tapes sound incredible, and the package includes never-before-seen photos from the actual concerts, making this a full-spectrum historical document that will thrill any Cecil Taylor fan.”
In the liner notes, Andrew Cyrille recalls, “By the time of the 1969 Salle Pleyel sets, Jimmy, Cecil and I had been playing together for a long time. For us to get on the bandstand and play together with such ease was something that we were used to… Everyone in our group knew what he was supposed to do in order to make a set work.”
Jack DeJohnette, who passed in October 2025, says, “Cecil would always open the show. I would get excited to have Cecil playing before we went on… the stage was reverberating when that band finished. It was still on fire.”
Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts is a stunning document of Cecil Taylor and his Unit playing at full strength, totally unfettered and yet working from a creative template and toward a common purpose. It’s a breathtaking musical experience, a journey of real beauty.
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ELEMENTAL MUSIC TO RELEASE 3-LP FREDDIE KING VINYL SET, RECORDED LIVE AT HIS DEFINING MOMENT, SET FOR RELEASE ON RECORD STORE DAY, APRIL 18, 2026
Feeling Alright: The Complete 1975 Nancy Jazz Pulsation Concerts captures Freddie King live at a pivotal point in his career, never before released
Deluxe package includes appreciations from his daughter, Wanda King, as well as ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, plus liner notes by author Cary Baker
Slated for release by Elemental Music exclusively for Record Store Day on April 18, 2026, Feeling Alright: The Complete 1975 Nancy Jazz Pulsation Concerts is a limited-edition 3-LP set capturing blues guitar giant Freddie King live before more than 50,000 fans at France’s Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival in October 1975 — the final full year of his life.
Previously unreleased and sourced from original ORTF (Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française) recordings, the newly restored 180-gram vinyl set documents an essential blues artist whose ferocious guitar tone, commanding singing, and genre-bridging vision helped reshape modern blues and rock.
Issued in cooperation with the Freddie King Estate, the set is produced by award-winning reissue producer Zev Feldman, widely known as the “Jazz Detective” for his celebrated archival discoveries. Mixing and sound restoration for the recordings was done by Marc Doutrepont (EQuuS), with mastering by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab. CD and digital editions will follow on April 24.
Freddie King — the Texas Cannonball — carved out his place in blues history by fusing raw tradition with explosive modern energy. With his stinging thumb-and-fingerpick attack, he delivered instrumentals like “Hide Away” and “Sen-Sa-Shun” that became essential study pieces for generations of guitarists, while his impassioned singing — notably on “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” included here — matched the fire of his guitar. Onstage, his commanding presence and sheer force of delivery gave the blues a rock ’n’ roll intensity that directly influenced players from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
The expansive set moves easily from King’s classic instrumentals — including “Sen-Sa-Shun,” paired in a medley with Magic Sam’s “Lookin’ Good” — to signature vocal performances such as “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” seguéd into B.B. King’s “Whole Lot of Lovin’.” King also delivers powerful readings of blues standards including “Sweet Little Angel,” “Got My Mojo Working,” “The Things I Used to Do,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Messin’ with the Kid,” “Danger Zone,” and “Stormy Monday.”
Drawing from the rock musicians he helped inspire, King also includes two rock staples that had become part of his live repertoire: Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright” (popularized by Traffic and Joe Cocker) and Don Nix’s “Goin’ Down.” In all, the collection features sixteen performances across six sides of vinyl.
The performance represents a convergence of Freddie King’s single years and album years — Texas swing, Chicago club-honed blues, and later rock-infused work shaped alongside Leon Russell and Don Nix — delivered with authority before an international audience at one of Europe’s premier festivals.
The album features King on guitar and vocals, joined by Alvin Hemphill on organ; Ed Lively, guitar; Lewis Stephens, piano; Benny Turner on bass; and Calep Emphrey, drums.
King was appearing at the Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival as part of what Stephens — who played keyboards in his band during those overseas dates — recalls as a “blistering” five- or six-week run through France. “Freddie had truly hit his stride as a blues-rock star in Europe and the U.S.,” he reflects.
The set includes liner notes by music journalist and historian Cary Baker, author of Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music, along with comments from reissue producer Zev Feldman and appreciations from King’s daughter and estate administrator Wanda King, as well as ZZ Top guitarist Billy F. Gibbons. As Gibbons writes, “At this show in Nancy — just a year before his untimely departure — the Texas Cannonball poured it on in a big way.”
As Feldman notes in his reissue producer’s statement: “Freddie King is and remains a king indeed — a defining figure in blues and rock guitar. These recordings capture a moment when he was transcending audiences and influencing players around the world. It’s also been deeply meaningful to work with his daughter, Wanda King, as we set out not only to release this music, but to celebrate Freddie’s legacy and the impact he made. These performances present him at his very best — and they’re thrilling to hear.”